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Suraj
Suraj

Reputation: 586

Will replacing H1 tag with H2 have any effect on my website's SEO?

Currently my website has two kinds of pages, and have good Google page ranking.

One type of page is Exercise pages, which uses H1 and H2 tags.
And the other is Article pages, which uses H2 and H3 tags.

I want to show my Exercise pages as most important pages of my website and should be shown before Article pages.

So if I use H2 and H3 tags for the Exercise pages, will it have any effect on SEO?
Or will Exercise pages have the same importance as Article pages? (Which I don't want. I want Exercise pages to have more impact)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1552

Answers (1)

James
James

Reputation: 4803

It doesn't make sense how you have it now, or the changes you want to make.

Firstly - how to write good sites, which Google will rank you higher for:

Every page should have a h1, which represents the main title of that page.
Then you use h2 to h6 to form sub headings for the rest of the content, each one used for a given block of content as required.

Playing with headings are not likely to allow you to "choose" where you want your ranking to go.
It's the wrong approach anyway, as you should simply be using headings correctly and as they are designed. Not as some attempt to get Google to place rank.

You should also understand that Google is a little cleverer than dumbly ranking you from site headings.

The way to rank is partly other people linking to you, but Google will also rank you if you write clear, well presented pages, and use headings correctly as they are supposed to be used :

W3C Wrote:

Since some users skim through a document by navigating its headings, it is important to use them appropriately to convey document structure. Users should order heading elements properly. For example, in HTML, H2 elements should follow H1 elements, H3 elements should follow H2 elements, etc. Content developers should not "skip" levels (e.g., H1 directly to H3).

While obeying W3C rules doesn't necessarily mean Google will like your site, it is a fairly good basis to go on, given Google does use W3C standards in some of it's ranking processes.

As for trying to "move rank" around your site with headings, or anything else, it doesn't make any sense, and is impossible really.

Each part of your site will be ranked and listed in Google results based on the relevant keywords for individual parts of your site. Google will simply list them in relevance order based on the keywords someone typed.

If both Articles and Exercises have the same keywords, then all you need to do is work on promoting Exercises as per normal SEO promotions etc, until it is ranked higher than Articles for the same keywords.

Otherwise, just work on ranking your site naturally and ignore pointless and old tactics, and all parts of your site will be ranked based on it's own particular keywords.

It might be worthwhile reading a few basic (and modern) SEO articles to understand how Google ranks these days.

Additionally, no-one can tell for sure what Google will do from any changes on your site. Only Google knows this.

We can only speculate based on experience and pattern matching (even then, Google shifts patterns and so things can change frequently).

Upvotes: 1

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